The sale has helped PhonePe add more users and see a sharp rise in transactions as it offered steep cashbacks of up to 30% for all transactions for the sale made through its app.Mugdha Variyar | ET Bureau | Updated: May 19, 2017, 11:45 IST

The five-day sale on Flipkart has bolstered the number of UPI (Unified Payments Interface) transactions, with the company's payments arm PhonePe recording one-million transactions through the payment platform during the sale. Flipkart closed its Big 10 sale on Thursday.

The sale has helped PhonePe add more users and see a sharp rise in transactions as it offered steep cashbacks of up to 30% for all transactions for the sale made through its app.

Overall, PhonePe saw 2.5-million transactions in the five days of the sale for a total value of Rs 250 crore, with its wallet seeing 1 million transactions and the rest coming from credit and debit cards, CEO Sameer Nigam said.

Before the sale, PhonePe was seeing 1,20,000 transactions a day on UPI during the month of May.

“The Big 10 Sale was a big proof of concept as we saw unprecedented traffic on the app and millions of shoppers were able to transact, pay and get instant cash backs seamlessly,“ Nigam said. He said that PhonePe saw 40% of all prepaid transactions for Flipkart, Myntra and Jabong. 90% of the total traffic for Flipakrt's sale came through mobile. PhonePe also saw 1.6 million app downloads in five days.

PhonePe's figures are likely to give a boost to UPI numbers this month. According to data from the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), about 3 lakh UPI transactions have been done every day in the month of May so far.With this sale, PhonePe has alone seen over 2 lakh UPI transactions a day this week.

“PhonePe's adoption of UPI in merchant payments will help to unleash the potential of the platform among merchants. We see huge growth in UPI for merchants in the next six months,“ Dilip Asbe, chief operating officer at NPCI, said.

The sale may have also helped PhonePe surpass daily transaction numbers of the government-backed BHIM app. According to the latest NPCI data, the BHIM app saw 3.1-million transactions in the month of April. On an average, this would mean one-lakh transactions a day in April. However, BHIM's figures for the month of May are not yet available.

While BHIM app has the highest share among UPI transactions, among private players, PhonePe seems to have the lead, and the numbers during the sale seems to have further boosted it.